We analyze the effect of workforce composition by birthplace on workers' wages. In our model, each worker's productivity may depend on whether co-workers are of the same or of a different birthplace. Wages depend both on the relative size of workers' groups as well as on the production structure...

The analysis of how the economic crisis in Europe has reshaped migration flows faces two challenges: (i) the confounding influence of correlated changes in the attractiveness of alternative destinations, and (ii) the role of rapidly changing expectations about the evolution of the economic...

The enlargement of the European Union in 2004 caused a large migration wave from Central Europe to Ireland and the UK. This paper addresses the question whether such an emigration wave changes the wage distribution in the source country. In a theoretical model of a labor market I show that some...

Private transfers between households in developing countries have been extensively studied and shown to be economically important as mechanisms of risk sharing and income redistribution. We argue that migration and remittances have the potential to modify the prevalent transfer behaviour in...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector specific factors model, in which...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the...

Over the last decades, the United States has become increasingly integrated in the world economy. Very low trade barriers and comparatively liberal migration policies have made these developments possible. What drove US congressmen to support the recent wave of globalization? While much of the...

Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV)...

This paper looks at the e ffect of cultural barriers on the skill selection of international migration. The data covers bilateral migration stocks by skill level in 2000 from about 99 sending countries to the main 15 destination countries. We use genetic distance as a proxy for cultural distance...

Goods trade and international mobility of labor are typically analyzed separately. While there is excellent research in both fields, far less is known about the interrelationships between international migration and international trade. This paper provides a first structurally estimable model of...